Same ‘ole Hoboken song and dance

Most of you probably have heard of the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. But if you haven’t, it’s a site that was started about 10 years ago to archive most websites in existence. Like a time machine, you can go back and see how life (both online and off) was at a previous point. Over 55 billion webpages to browse through. Pretty cool.

For instance, Hobokeni, Hoboken’s first website was started back in 1996. See how this site (and others) have evolved with the technology and times. Gone are the buzzwords like “cyber” and “Netscape”, along with the cruddy design.

But most interestingly, there are remnants of the old “Community Bulletin Boards” still left behind. It was an old-school threaded style chat forum and it seems like even 10 or so years ago, many of the same topics still come up! You can’t read the posts, but you can get the jist of them from the subjects.

Be careful clicking some of the oldest archives however, they have bad Java code that will freeze your browser! I suffered so you don’t have to.

And this link from 1998:– “Russo postings removed: Censorship”
– “Why isn’t the Enviromental Committee concerned about the Parking Garage at 916 Garden?”
– “Every weekend looks like St. Patricks Day in this town”
– “City Employees still living with Mommy (in subsidized housing)”
– “Subsidized housing & corruption” and “Payoff Towers”
– Plus talk of a Baseball Museum that never happened.

Amazing how the tone is eerily similar to what we’re hearing around town these days.

Is the town that transient that these items get forgotten so easily? No one votes?
What about the people that have lived here since then and beyond? Do they get sick of the same rhetoric?
Does it boil down to lack of good candidates? Information? What?

Now that the internet is 1000+ times more powerful and influencial, hopefully gone are the days of just a FEW people griping about their lack of satisfaction in Hoboken without results. I feel change coming, and possibly may even be a part of it.

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411 you can be an advocate for change in this town with your daily focus. People are too busy with work, kids, etc to know what is happening at these zoning and city council meetings until it is too late. Using technology you are really sheding light and exposing the true corruption of Hoboken. I just hope you gain a new seat on the council. There should be a Deputy of Information position added where you are in charge of informing the public of everything that is going on. There should also be full discloser of every city offical’s real estate and business holdings published. That will get Joel Mestre and Al Arizzo to resign in a hurry.

Great links! Those were the good old days, when the Hobokeni board served up some seriously hot stuff. I was pleased to see one of my old posts there (ericK – 2/6/98). Rumor had it that the old Hobokeni board was shut down because speculation on the origin of Anthony Russo’s black eye was hitting too close to the mark.

It also serves to remind me of how much Russo used to piss people off. Roberts is a walk in the park (ha!) by comparison.

Well, there was a good amount of truth to those headings with regards to Russo, though…
The fact that he made deals with all the developers to have his wife be the listing agent on all the condos they built is probably one of the grossest abuses of power by a mayor that I’ve ever witnessed…. That feat netted them millions of dollars, and aside from being illegal and exclusionary, they were able to get away with it for a long period of time.
It’s pretty embarrassing that it took so many years for them to indict him for all the laws and rules he broke while in office. May he rot in prison.
It lends support to the arguments against the current mayor Roberts. I hope it’s only a matter of time before he is linked to the developer dollars he is taking. Remember the ice skating rink that he put up without approval using developer money? That’s just one of the more noticeable things he has done- I’m sure there are a fair share of kickbacks that we haven’t heard about as well..